is open wide enough, I step inside and wait. From here, I’m in the living room and have a view of two doors. I can’t tell where the doors lead from here, but if I go through one, I leave my back exposed. If that fucking music weren’t playing there’d be a possibility of me hearing him, but with it, I can’t pinpoint anything.
So I listen and wait.
After ten minutes, my patience is wearing thin and I move forward just a little. To the left is a kitchen and to the right looks like it leads toward the bedrooms. This late in the evening, his probability of being in the kitchen is less likely, so I turn toward the bedroom and step into the hallway.
I narrowly duck in time for a baseball bat to smash into the wall. The asshole clearly heard me or saw me at some point and had been waiting for me to make the first move. He must not have a gun on him or is afraid it’ll make too much noise because he seems to be insistent on bashing my head in with a bat instead.
I grab his arm and drive it to my right and down, pulling him into me as I knee him right in the abdomen. It knocks the air out of him as he staggers back, and I move in to drop him to the ground.
He’s quicker at recovering than I thought and swings the bat up fast and hard, slamming it into my gun hand. I inadvertently drop the gun and before he can do anything about it, I kick the gun behind me and into the living room, out of his reach. I dodge the next blow from the bat and shove him back into the far wall where I punch him in the face. It sends severe pain spiking up into my hand from where the bat had bashed it.
And that’s the only moment he needs before sending an uppercut right to my abdomen. The air is socked out of me as I stumble back and realize that maybe cutting corners with this man wasn’t ideal. He grabs for me and I dodge him, but in order to do so, I’ve put myself into a corner I don’t necessarily want to be in. I slide to the side just in time to avoid another hit and reach for my second gun, but he doesn’t give me the chance before the baseball bat crashes into the wall where my head had just been. I punch him in the face while remembering that my skills really reside more with my gunwork. While I am by no means a bad hand-to-hand fighter, I’m so much better at just shooting a target. And right now, there’s no shooting going on which is shown by my face meeting his fist.
He’s like a fucking monkey as he rides my body to the ground, and suddenly we’re rolling around on the ground kicking, kneeing, and punching for all we’re worth. I manage to slide out from under him and grab him in a headlock from behind where I squeeze on tight. He rises to his knees and desperately tries punching me and grabbing me to get me off. He barely manages to get ahold of my mask, which he claws from my face. It doesn’t take long before he grabs the bat and begins beating me with it, but I refuse to let go until his legs can’t hold his weight and he drops to the ground.
Saying my body aches would be an understatement. I’ve been beaten, punched, kicked, elbowed, and kneed. I’m bleeding, which is never good at a future crime scene, and I have an unconscious asshole who clearly knows what he’s doing. And my hand fucking hurts.
So I take a moment to assess the damage in the room.
On a scale of “This was a perfect hit” to “Prison here I come” this is kind of a “Well, I’m fucked, but it’s fixable.”
I bind his legs and arms with some ties I’d brought with me and drag him into the bathroom where I tie him to the handlebar in the tub. I turn the water on and spray him in the face, making him jerk awake.
“What the fuck!” he cries out then begins thrashing this way and that as I grab a towel off the counter and hold it to my bleeding head. I don’t need to clean up more blood.
“I’d like to